In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  24

  THE CONDUCTOR IS announcing the name of the next station in a solemn, powerful voice that rises above the noise of the train. Other passengers are already standing, putting on hats, raincoats, light topcoats, looking out the windows with an air of fatigue, men tired after a full day’s work who return home at nightfall, picking up briefcases, folding newspapers, looking at a landscape so familiar they barely notice it, the immense width of the river, the bank the train runs along, so close to the water that small waves break against the tracks’ incline, the landscape of daily life that never seems to change, or only to the extent that the seasons change, night falls earlier or later, reds and yellows replace the bright greens in the treetops. There’s an end to each journey and to each flight, but where does desertion end, and when? The river’s current has an oily texture stained red in the declining light. You can keep running from misfortune and fear, but there is no hiding from remorse. The hills on the opposite bank acquire a darker and denser rust color, interrupted by white splashes of houses where lights are being turned on, though it’s not dark yet. Perfect places to take refuge, for two lovers to meet, for someone to come back to, tired and at peace, and not lock the door or fear noises in the night. With briefcases or small suitcases in hand and overcoat lapels raised against the damp cold of the woods and the river, the passengers will walk home along gravel paths. He too had walked from the small station in the Sierra, one afternoon in late September or early October, the vivid memory of an autumn that had just begun: early nightfall, the aroma of damp earth and pines, the smoke of an oak log rising from the chimney against the still blue sky, the creak of the gate and the cold iron on his hands, while from the house, at the end of the garden, came his children’s voices. Back then he didn’t have a car. He’d have returned by train, enjoying the trip, going over papers or letting his eyes linger on the stands of oak that had a gleam of dusty gold in the afternoon sun, the silhouette of a deer among the oaks, or the flash of a hare. He would walk on fallen leaves covering the gravel path that led to the house; as he got closer, the children’s faces became visible, pressed against a window, Adela standing behind them. The train whistle always alerted them of his arrival.

  He prepares again for another arrival, his suitcase ready, his wallet in place, safe in his inside pocket, his passport in the other. Ignacio Abel touches the roughness of his beard, wondering about his appearance now that he’ll be scrutinized by the eyes of strangers: his suit not cleaned and pressed, his raincoat wrinkled, his shirt stained with coffee, the shoes he should have had shined this morning. Some passengers are moving toward the exit at the back of the car, others remain seated. Sudden weariness in his shoulders and the back of his neck, in fingers that have to grasp the suitcase, in feet that after more than two hours on the train have swollen inside his worn shoes, discouragement on an arrival so long postponed, the end of his journey but perhaps not of his flight and certainly not of his desertion. So much impatience to arrive here, and now he’d like the trip to last longer, a few hours, perhaps all night, to avoid all movement, the need to speak, to reestablish human communication, become again the man he was, avoid the anguish of answering questions—how was your trip, you must be very tired, what was it like to live in Madrid, is this the first time you’ve visited the United States. He’d give anything for this not to be his station, to remain seated a little longer, his neck against the back of the seat, his face near the glass, watching the autumnal woods go by, and the river, nothing more than that, making out from time to time a light on a dock, in the window of a solitary house, a house where lovers can hide or a woman and her children can hear the train whistle and know the father will arrive in a few minutes along the path through the trees.

  He can calculate how many days his trip has lasted, his flight. But he knows his desertion didn’t begin three weeks ago in Madrid, when he closed the door of his apartment and didn’t bother to insert the key—the key that jingles in his trouser pocket along with some Spanish, French, and American coins, the same pocket where he keeps the train ticket and the receipt from the cafeteria where he had a cup of coffee and a pastry this morning—but much earlier, more than two months earlier, on Sunday, July 19, to be precise, a few minutes before five in the afternoon, at the exact moment he closed the iron gate at the house in the Sierra and heard the train whistle nearby. Weak, almost a hiss, scaled to the Spanish penury in things, not like the deep vibration of a ship’s siren with which this American train announces its approach, resounding in the river and the woods, the woods that just a step from the tracks have a jungle’s untamable density. He looked at his watch, two minutes to five, for once the train would be on time. He began to walk quickly along the dirt path, past the adobe walls of other summer houses, beneath the vertical sun of the July siesta, even though he had more than enough time since the station was very close, the little station where two or three weeks earlier Adela had arrived at about the same time on the train from Madrid, when the men who played cards in the tavern were surprised to see her on the platform alone, wearing high-heeled shoes and a small-brimmed hat tilted over her face. The same men would stare at him when he arrived on the platform, deserted in the lethargy of noon. A couple of Civil Guards walked along the platform, their uniforms old, their primitive muskets on their shoulders, their dark features contracting in the heat beneath their three-cornered hats. One of them asked Ignacio Abel for his identity card and whether he was going to Madrid. Under the marquee the station clock had stopped, its glass broken. On the list of scheduled arrivals and departures, written in chalk on a blackboard, there were two or three spelling mistakes. The July heat crushed the will and made things unravel, anesthetizing consciousness under the blinding sunlight and the cicadas’ chirping. The train pulled in and the coal locomotive filled the air with black smoke. Inside the carriage he trembled with impatience, with disbelief; he looked at his watch as he settled onto the hard wooden seat. For the first time in many days he’d meet Judith Biely not in a café, not at a park corner, but in the house of Madame Mathilde, in the rented bedroom where the curtains would be closed, where he’d see her naked, coming toward him, Judith recovered, offering herself again, resisting her own decision, tied to him by a need more powerful than remorse or decency. In spite of it all you were dying to get back to Madrid. You couldn’t care less about your children, and me even less. You were lucky to catch the last train to the city. You probably don’t remember how the children liked to watch the trains go by, anticipating your arrival. So strange not to hear the trains come and go anymore. I don’t have to tell you what would have happened to you had you stayed.

  He’d walked away from the house along the garden path, brushing against the rockrose, the overnight bag in his hand, resisting the temptation to look at his watch, to quicken his pace while still in sight of everyone, trying to control his impatience and haste, at least until he heard the gate close behind him. It was then that he took one last look at the house; the family had resumed their conversation in the shade of the grapevine, as if they had already forgotten his existence. The scene couldn’t have been more distant or insular had he been looking at a photo of a stranger’s family on their Sierra vacation. People were frozen in a casual manner while keeping their distance from each other: the older man in an undershirt, who at any moment will doze in his rocking chair, a straw hat down over his eyes; the white-haired woman in a dark apron, the matriarch of the house, sitting in a low chair, sewing or embroidering or holding in her hands what might be a rosary; the corpulent priest with his legs wide apart and the collar of his cassock unfastened; the frail unmarried ladies, their hair arranged in an outdated style; the other younger woman still attractive in spite of the gray streaks in her hair and the glasses on her broad, placid face which she wears to read a book, and who appears to be lost in her reading and not looking at the man in the light suit who walks down the path, his back to her, attempting not to quicken his pace in too obvious, too shameless a way; going to a
place, a person, in spite of his awkward promises, his contrition that’s false not because he’s lying but because there is nothing to be done, because the irreparable has already taken place. As she watched him leave, she knew he’d turn when he reached the gate. Between shadow and light, the back of a figure holding a tray: for the person who sees the photograph after years have passed, that face will remain hidden; the young maid, a white apron over her dark dress and the cap the señora insists she wear even though they’re in the Sierra, holding on the tray a large pitcher of fresh lemonade and some glasses: when she moves between shadow and light projected by the trellis, the sun shines for a few seconds on the yellow-green liquid, turning it golden. He should have had a glass of lemonade before he left; Adela offered it, looking at him out of the corner of her eye, but he couldn’t take the risk. Now he was thirsty, and when he turned at the gate he felt that the soft collar of his summer shirt was too tight. In the photo, perhaps in a blur, the figure of his daughter, who, after accompanying her father halfway across the garden and giving him two kisses and telling him to come back soon, sat on the swing and began to sway back and forth, more childish in the house in the Sierra than in Madrid because she’s closer to her little-girl memories, the treasured memory of so many identical summer vacations, the same garden and the same swing with its rusty hinges, her father walking away, his briefcase in his hand, the sleepy voices of the family gathering behind her as she begins to swing, the solemn voice of her grandfather, the chirping-bird titters of the maiden aunts. She’ll call her brother to come and give her a push, now that they no longer fight as they did only a few years ago about who’d sit on the swing first, they won’t count aloud the number of times each pushes the other, and it won’t be necessary for their mother or father to come and order a rigorous taking of turns. In the photograph, in memory, the boy is a figure separate from the others, sitting on the highest step at the entrance to the house beside one of the squat granite columns that support the veranda on the upper floor, in front of the area of densest shade from the portico where flies buzz. The boy does nothing, he simply looks at his father, who’s leaving; he is suddenly grown, taciturn, with a shadow of thin facial hair on his upper lip, having entered adolescence, aggrieved because his father’s going to a life he doesn’t know and his mother and sister don’t share; watching him leave with the old rankling mixture of relief, resentment, and nostalgia, the son who hasn’t stopped watching his mother since they brought her home from the hospital, where she spent a week after an accident no one explained and only he knows, imagines, has to do with his father, with his father’s unfamiliar, terrified face on the night he saw him standing in the center of his study, in front of the overturned drawer, among disordered papers and photographs on the floor. There are things he sees so clearly yet others seem not to notice, and this disconcerts him and draws him into himself, something that is not obvious in photos from previous summers but is captured in this image, existing only in Ignacio Abel’s mind, fixed there because of his own guilt. A child changes so rapidly at that age, he must already have pimples, his voice must be deepening, and if his father heard it now, after only three months, perhaps he wouldn’t recognize it. What school would he be attending, if any schools are open on the other side, in the enemy zone, his son, so fond of movies and magazines, who failed half his exams in June, though his father and mother didn’t pay much attention to a setback that in other circumstances would have angered them, his mother in the hospital and then convalescing in the bedroom where the curtains were always closed, his father so distracted by his work at University City, leaving the house at dawn and coming home in the middle of the night, picked up at the entrance to the building by a car in which someone he trusted traveled with him and, Miguel and Lita knew, carried a pistol, a bodyguard like the ones in movies, though he wore a mason’s cap, not a gangster’s hat, and had a cigarette in a corner of his mouth.

  What was it like to have experienced that Sunday, that entire week? How many people are left who still remember, who preserve a precious image like a fragile relic, one not added to in retrospect, not induced by knowledge of what was about to occur, what no one foresaw in its monstrous scale, its irrationality, lasting so long no one would remember normal life or have the strength to miss it, life already in hopeless disarray though there’s not a single sign of change in the things Ignacio Abel saw when he left the house, after closing the squeaking gate and using a handkerchief to wipe the rust from his sweaty hand. I want to imagine, with the precision of lived experience, what happened twenty years before I was born and what no one will remember anymore in just a few years: the brightness of those few distant days in July and the darkness of time, that very afternoon, the days that preceded it; to do this I’d need an impossible sixth sense to perceive a past that precedes memory itself: I’d need to be innocent of the future, ignorant of what is imminent in the present, in each of these people’s lives, their astonishing, uniform blindness, like one of those ancient epidemics that erased millions. But if I could reach out my hand across the frontier of time, touch things, not merely imagine them, not merely see them in museum display cases or by staring hard at the details in photographs: touch the cool surface of that pitcher of water a waiter has just left on the table in a café in Madrid; walk along the Gran Vía or the Calle de Alcalá and feel the bright sunlight vanish in the shade provided by striped awnings whose colors can’t be distinguished in black-and-white photos; touch the fleshy geranium leaves seen around a window frame in the photograph of a station in the Sierra very similar to the one close to the house where Ignacio Abel’s family spends the summers. The most trivial thing would be a treasure: getting into a taxi in Madrid on a July day in 1936, the odor of the worn, sweaty leather, of the hair pomade men used in those days, of the back seat, a smell of tobacco that must be very different from what can be breathed in now because everything’s minutely specific and everything’s disappeared, or almost everything, just as almost everything I could see looking out the window, if I were granted the gift of riding in that taxi, has disappeared except the topography of the streets and the architecture of a certain number of buildings—everything demolished by a great cataclysm, more efficient and more tenacious than war, one that occurs each minute and has carried away all the automobiles, all the streetcars with their advertisements faded by the weather, all the awnings and all the store signs, that has submerged paving stones in asphalt and before that torn up the tracks of the streetcars, the mannequins in the shop windows in their summer dresses and bathing costumes and the large smiling heads in the hat stores, all the posters pasted on façades, faded by the rain and sun, torn off in strips, posters for political meetings and bullfights and soccer games and boxing matches, posters for contests to choose the most beautiful señorita at the festival of Carmen, election posters from the February campaign that display categorical statements of victory by candidates who were then defeated. To see, touch, smell: one hazy morning late in May, as I pass by the fence of a country manor half in ruins, I smell the dense, delicate aroma of poplar blossoms from a gigantic tree that has prospered in abandonment and weeds, and the aroma is undoubtedly identical to what someone might have smelled when passing this same spot seventy-three years earlier. I touch the pages of a newspaper—a bound volume of the daily Ahora from July 1936—and it seems I’m touching something that belongs to the substance of that time, but the paper leaves the feel of dust, like dry pollen, on my fingertips, and the pages break at the corners if I don’t turn them with the necessary care. It isn’t hard for me to conjecture that Ignacio Abel would read that Republican, politically moderate paper, with excellent graphics, an abundance of brief articles in tiny print that after three-quarters of a century continue to transmit, like the buzz of a honeycomb, a powerful, distant drone of lost words, voices extinguished long ago. He bought the paper on Sunday, July 12, when he got off the train in the station at nightfall, back from the Sierra, and probably glanced at it and put it in his pocket o
r left it in the taxi that took him to the center of the city, to the Plaza de Santa Ana, with the carelessness that characterizes how most ordinary things are handled and lost, things that are everywhere every day and yet disappear without a trace after a short time, or are preserved by pure chance because someone used the pages of that day’s paper to line a drawer, or because the paper was left in a trunk no one opened again for seventy years, along with a little notebook that had a few dates written in it, a packet of postcards, a box of matches, a coaster from a cabaret on which a red owl is drawn, seeds of a time that will bear fruit in the imagination of someone not yet born. He was going to the Plaza de Santa Ana in the hope of seeing Judith. Three days earlier she’d agreed by phone to meet him when she returned from her trip to Granada, so frequently postponed, on condition he not look for her, not call her, not write to her. She didn’t say when she’d go to Granada or when she’d return and had no reason to give him that information. She’d be waiting for him in Madame Mathilde’s house on Sunday, the nineteenth, then perhaps she’d leave to take some literature courses at the International University of Santander. Ignacio Abel agreed with the urgency of an addict ready to lose everything in exchange for a single dose of guaranteed pleasure. He hung up the phone and began to count the days until he’d see her. On Saturday morning, the eleventh, he left the car at a repair shop on Calle Jorge Juan and went by train to the Sierra. He chatted with Don Francisco de Asís, the uncle who was a priest, the maiden aunts; he said the construction strike couldn’t last much longer and it wasn’t true that gangs of threatening strikers were breaking into grocery stores; he denied that he himself was in any danger; he’d received a few anonymous letters like everyone else, but the police assured him he had nothing to worry about, so he’d dispensed with the armed guard who came to pick him up each morning, to the disappointment of Miguel, who found it worthy of a novel that no one could tell the serious young man was carrying an automatic pistol under his jacket; his brother-in-law Víctor had told them it would be impossible for him to come to the family dinner that Sunday, and so Doña Cecilia’s rice and chicken could be enjoyed without the uncertainties and surprises of almost every summer Sunday, though Doña Cecilia couldn’t stop wondering where that boy would eat, in some inn or tavern or whatever, especially considering how much he liked her rice, which in the judgment of Don Francisco de Asís had no equal in the best restaurants in Madrid. Adela was present for everything, calm and withdrawn, a little drowsy because of the pills prescribed for her when she’d been discharged from the sanatorium. She accepted with a forced smile her husband’s new deferential treatment; Miguel, observing her, was surprised the smile was so affected, that there was in her an even more meager sense of authenticity than in his father’s conjugal attentions: adjusting the cushion at the back of her wicker chair, filling her glass with water. When he arrived on Saturday, Ignacio Abel had brought her a bouquet of flowers. Adela thanked him, saying they were pretty, but she didn’t look at them once after she’d handed the bouquet to the maid to put in a vase. Beneath a façade of normality the family hid an unspeakable secret. After the rice, and coffee in the shade of the trellis, Ignacio Abel seemed to have dozed off for a while in the rocking chair, but the hands resting on the curved arms couldn’t abandon themselves to rest. Miguel saw the tension in the knuckles beneath the skin, the movement of the eyeballs beneath the lids. Detectives at Scotland Yard solve seemingly unsolvable mysteries by studying the most insignificant details at the crime scene. It was enough for the sound of a train to approach for his father to open his eyes, to dissemble as he consulted his watch. It was amazing how little capacity for pretense adults had, so predictable and yet so pompous, so sure their actions would awaken no suspicions. A few minutes before the six o’clock train for Madrid arrived, Miguel saw his father cross the garden in his light suit and summer hat, his briefcase under his arm, walking to the gate where he’d turn to say goodbye before he disappeared for several days. He holds his briefcase tightly to let us know that what he carries inside is very important and he has to leave. He turns after he’s opened the gate and doesn’t wait to be lost from sight before erasing from his face any indication of still being here.